Lightroom Worth-a-click

? The folks over at Unified Color have caused quite a bit of stir with their new HDR Expose program. It’s got a plug-in for Lightroom as well so you can use it seamlessly. Here’s a couple of videos if you want to check it out.
- Using HDR Expose
- HDR Expose and Lightroom

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

26 Comments

I cannot find LR3 at any of the authorized reseller locations in my area (Tampa). Due to the purchasing system through the state, we may not purchase online. My beta is dead for two weeks now. Please advise.

HDR Expose is wonderful. I downloaded the trial today and just bought it! I’m normally just looking for a natural/realistic look and have never been happy with the results I got from either Photomatics or Photoshop CS5. With HDR Expose I was able to get great looking natural results quickly on the first try. It totally blows away both Photomatics and Photoshop CS5 for producing a natural look. If you’re looking for grunge, you may want one of the others, but if you’re looking for natural, give HDR Expose a try.

Boy am I confused. Straighten this out Matt—–first I used Photomatix after seeing your course on Kelby Online Training—I liked it, and became proficient with it—thanks to you—then CS5 comes out with an HDR module—I’m not sure I still need Photomatix—–getting used to CS5—and you hit me with HDR Expose. Now *upgrade* is my middle name—I’m your ideal demographic for new stuff—-but please tell me if there is a substantive improvement over CS5 and Photomatix. I’m getting overwhelmed.. See you in Vegas

Hey Gerry,
It was just a news item. Sorry for any confusion. I’m usually pretty good about “Guys, you have to try this” if I really think you should. I’ve tried the product and I think it’s good. For me, I’ll stick with CS5 but some one who hadn’t upgraded to CS5 should definitely take a look.

I was excited to find out about the FTP Publishing program and bought it straight away so that I could make changes/additions/deletions to my website from LR3 rather than uploading the whole file again every time. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked for me, because I keep getting the error message: “Bad argument #1 to ‘find’ (string expected, got nil)”. My settings were the same as I used when successfully uploading from the Web module to my site, so am at a loss to figure this out. I emailed Tim a number of days ago, but no response. If you or anyone has had this problem or has found a solution, I’d love to hear it!
Cheers,
John

You have to be a bit intrigued with Unified Color’s 32 bit color number crunching. Have you tried it yet, and do you have any big preferences between Photomatix, CS5’s HDR, and Unified Color’s HDR Expose?

Based on what I saw in the videos, I’m not certain that I would get all excited for this plugin. I’m assuming that it’s probably vastly cheaper than CS5, so it’s probably a viable alternative. That being said though, I think LR4 will probably contain Pano & HDR because they are so highly desired in terms of features. It’s next to “stupid” not to have them inside of it now as it is. Between LR3 & CS5 I’m pretty well covered, although I’m interested in seeing if these other HDR tools handle them better than CS5.

I have been reading Jack Reznicki and Ed Greenberg’s Photographer’s Survival Manual and in one chapter they describe an action that Jack set up in Photoshop to prep images for electronic submission to the Copyright office. But I was thinking that the same thing could be done with an export preset in Lightroom- could it not? Seems to me that you could set up a preset that would leave you with a folder of photos properly sized and formatted for upload. Have you done a step by step or a video on this? I think I have it pretty much figured out, but would appreciate the advice of someone who knows Lightroom better than I, and who has perhaps already done this. Is there a tutorial already or is there the possibility for one in the near future?

This HDR program looks interesting. I gave them my email address to get a free download (trial). Off subject. I’ve had a unique problem going on with LR3 and Nik Software Plug-ins. I was wondering if you had these same problems. I have both LR 2.7 and LR 3 running on my computer (Windows 7 64bit). I installed all my Plug-ins as external editing. They work just fine in LR 2.7, but not in LR3. In LR 3, the Nik software copies the .tif to the film strip, then loads, but then gives me an error message that the file can not be found or does not exist or access is denied. The file never loads into the Nik software. I have Nik working on the problem. They are puzzled. Have you heard anything from Adobe on this problem?

I also use Nik plug-in’s (Mac based). Unless things have changed very recently, only the Viveza 2 plug-in is 64-bit compatible. The others are not. Try running LR3/PS5 in 32-bit mode. My Nik products work fine for me when opened and accessed under the 32-bit mode. Hopefully Nik will get on this problem soon!

Thanks for our reply. With LR for Windows, Nik supplies plug-ins that work with 64 bit Lightroom. I’ve use them with LR 2 all the time. They just don’t open the file in LR 3. It’s really weird. I’ve sent a screen capture to Nik. I’m hoping they come up with a solution. If not, I’ll have to stick with LR 2.7.

That 2.7 supported the plug-in’s in 64-bit is surprising as both their tech support and the support section on their website indicate that the products aren’t 64-bit compatible. Check out their FAQ at:

You are correct when working with PS. The only Nik plug-in that works is Viveza 2 with PS 64 bit. However, with LR they have them working and my LR 2, which is 64 bit. I know that sounds crazy, but it works. In PS, I have to use the 32 bit version (Adobe loads both 32 and 64 in Windows) to get all the plug-ins. I’m not really sure how they treat MAC OS. I’ll keep you posted on the fix if there is one.

Sorry for the bad grammar in the previous post. I need to do a better job of reading before I post. What I meat to say was, when I purchased the Nik software I was given two downloads. One for PS and one for LR. The download for LR works with 64 bit LR. You might sign in at Nik and go to their download page to get updated versions. If I remember when I went there to update my plug-ins, they had Lightroom as a bullet point for downloading.